Xubuntu on 1999 Dell PIII 450mhz and 128 megs ram; not enough

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 01:07:43PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   Although I may be considered a Gentoo fanboi by some, I did try
> Xubuntu last week.  It wasn't on my main machine, but on my old 1999
> Dell.  The install was excruciatingly slow.  Once installed, Xubuntu was
> only painfully slow.
> 
>   Optimized Gentoo runs OK on the Dell, and I keep it around as my
> emergency backup.  With the exception of "internet TV" and editing
> 2560x1920 digital photos in Gimp, the Dell keeps pace with my AMD3000+
> with 2 gigs of main ram, and 256 meg video (twice as much as the Dell's
> main ram<g>).  Xubuntu is supposed to be the least-resource hungry
> Ubuntu variant, because it uses XFCE desktop, rather than GNOME (Ubuntu)
> or KDE (Kubuntu).

And debian installed with only what you want is even leaner.  Can't
compare any of the desktop environments with a plain simple X with a
window manager and nothing else.

>   I use Blackbox WM under Gentoo.  Desktop Environment?  We don't need
> no steenkin desktop environment.  Ubuntu is also probably compiled as
> i386.  I set Gentoo to build with...
> CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse"
> plus I throw in "mmx" and "sse" use flags.

More likely 486 since that is what glibc now requires as a minimum.
That already covers the majority of speedups over 386 apparently.  Using
sse for fp might be nice, but I believe the whole system has to be
compiled that way if you want libraries to work with it, although I
could be wrong.  sse also can't do 80bit FP, only 64 (which is fine for
most people, but for some people it matters).  mmx is a complete total
waste, and fortunately on 64bit it is banned along with x87 making sse
mandetory.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists